(Munich 1923–1982)
Champ Dynamique, 1962, titled, signed, dated inscribed on the reverse Fruhtrunk Paris, 1962 with directional arrow, vinyl on wood, 121.5 x 127 cm, framed

Provenance:
Neumeister Kunstauktionen München, 2008, Lot 1502
Grisebach, Berlin 2018, Lot 719
European Private Collection
Ketterer Munich, 7.6.2019, Lot 156

Literature:
Werkverzeichnis der Bilder, Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1952–1982 , ed. by Silke Reiter, Günter Fruhtrunk Gesellschaft e. v., München 2018, no. 256 (col. ill.)

“Painting is done by focussing on a fine balance between arbitrariness and sentimentality on the one hand and rationalistic alienation on the other.”

Günter Fruhtrunk

With his 1954 scholarship, the German painter Günter Fruhtrunk moved from his hometown Munich to Paris, where he worked in the studios of Fernand Léger and Hans Arp, among others. The significance of Günter Fruhtrunk for German post-war art is immense. The artist transports the ideas of Constructivism into a rhythmical pictorial world of bright colours. By strictly arranging vector-like diagonal stripes, alternating rhythmically in colour, he thereby develops a dynamic language of form. In order to earn his living in the 1950s, Günter Fruhtrunk designed a plastic carrier bag for the Aldi Group, which is still used today in the branches of Aldi-Nord in Germany.
From the 1960s onwards, Günter Fruhtrunk’s work concentrated only on the rhythmic staccato of coloured bars, which are joined together to form a horizontal and vertical score. Günter Fruhtrunk also achieves an increase in rhythm by tilting the entire format diagonally to further enhance the dynamics of the colour contrasts of, for example, red and blue in “Champ Dynamique” and intensifying the flickering effects of the work even more. “The picture becomes a provocation that is tangibly demanding and tensing on the eyes. Rhythmic systems compete with each other in their respective double meaning, as both founding and founded elements, in the same and common actuality ... The same picture that develops, as it were, in a successive alternation of positive and negative rhythmic values when the viewer is at close range, radicalises itself at a distance to a phenomenon of tension that denies all discursive perception.”

Norbert Kunisch (ed.)/ Max Imdahl, Erläuterungen zur Modernen Kunst, Düsseldorf 1992, p. 68